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Everyone who has a website offering services or products for sale are competing for the highest rankings on the search engines. It’s important to know how to make the most of local Internet marketing because this is a marketing strategy that will continue to grow and thrive.

This article has been created to help you understand local Internet marketing and how you can use it to help your business flourish.

Local Internet Marketing Tips

Use your website to help you meet your business objectives.

Create a measurement framework to check your progress over time:

Make your goals specific.

Set key performance indicators.

Learn how long your average customer spends on your website and how much they spend. This is known as your Lifetime Customer Value (LCV).

You also need to know how much you spend to attract a customer. This is known as your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).

Think about your budget and what you want to spend on your local Internet marketing campaign.

Develop your campaign and break it up into small steps.

Make sure the data you have is correct, consistent and up to date.

Build up citations of your business, which will determine the importance, and legitimacy of your company which influences the position achieved in search engine listings.

Manage and create a great website so that you can track its impact on your business objectives.

Conduct quality research to find out which keywords are used when searching for your product, services or company.

Make sure your site is fully optimized to ensure the technical elements are up to scratch and include localized feedback, reviews and testimonials.

Build up links to increase organic search visibility. You can join business and trade associations, link to charities that you support, get involved in local events, link with local directories or connect with local bloggers in your location and of course social media.

Encourage your customers to write reviews to improve how your business operates. You can also conduct polls and surveys. Make sure you follow the guidelines for asking for this kind of feedback.

Think outside of organic search and look at pay per click (PPC), Internet Yellow Pages (IYPs), Classified Sites as well as local newspapers and newsletters.

Tracking is vital, you need to make sure you understand how much you are paying out to attract a single customer and whether it’s worth the cost. There are a number of low cost analysis tools that you can use to create reports to let you know how your business is doing against the targets you set.

The mobile platform has changed dramatically since the introduction of smartphone and tablet technology and what was once only possible on a desktop or laptop computer is now as easy to access and perform in the palm of your hand.

This technology is still evolving and it’s important for business owners to take this into consideration if they plan to connect with as many people as possible as it is more common to browse, shop or interact through this type of medium than ever before.

The following guidelines will help you to provide a great user experience for your mobile customers:

Reflect Your Brand

Your customers should be able to recognize the branding of your company on the mobile website or application. Using the same graphics, web font and wording as on your main website it important as well as what you need the mobile platform to do like being able to shop and purchase items. Focus the design on what you consider to be the most important features.

Target Products

If you are limited in terms of space and resources, then you need to be specific in what you include in your mobile platform version of your site. This will also help you to optimize the performance of your site.

Be Customer Focused

It’s easy to get carried away about what you want your mobile site to do but try to remember the most important thing that will determine your success – your visitor, their needs and what they need to be able to do to turn from a browser into a customer.

Optimize Your Mobile Site

Mobile Internet is not like Internet you have at home. It can be lost easily if signal is weak and is influenced by factors outside of your control like the environment. Customers don’t like to be kept waiting for ages to load or spend time completing complex forms. All of these things waste their time. They want to be able to access your screens quickly so optimize each page to enable them to do this easily.

Use A Scaling Toolkit

Mobile platforms come in a variety of sizes and using a scaling toolkit can help you maintain the functionality of your site but also make your site look and perform the same across different platforms so decide what you absolutely have to have on the screens across all devices that will be compulsory to your business.

Monitor Progress

Be involved in the design, development and marketing of your product all the way along to make sure communication is open and your expectations are met.

For your mobile website design or app to be successful you need to make sure that choices made about the design don’t affect the performance and that needs to be an important factor right from the start so keep this in mind throughout all the stages and you will create an experience your customers will love.

Organic SEO is a variety of techniques, which are used to secure a ranked placement on search engine results pages. This article will explain some of the methods that can be used to optimize the content of your web pages, make sure links to content are used appropriately and use keywords and metatags to boost your ratings naturally.

Limit graphics as using too many will lower your search engine ranking.

If you are using flash, break the flash files into smaller files and add content.

Ask your visitor to do something once they get to your site like “buy now” or “sign up”.

Link social media icons to social sites like your Facebook, Twitter or Instagram accounts – show that you are concerned about interacting socially with your customers.

Use media such as video to encourage visitors to stay on your website longer.

Images need to be named and alt tags added. Search engines don’t read images but they do read titles and alt tags.

Include a robots.txt file, which tells the search engine crawler what can be crawled – make sure you keep it up to date.

Don’t use text the same color as the background in an attempt to hide it as this is a trick which if discovered is very heavily frowned upon and punished.

Create titles and use descriptive Meta tags that are unique using keywords and phrases that are specific to your site’s content.

Ensure your website has a site map which contains a comprehensive list of all the pages that you want the search engines to index.

If you aren’t sure how to implement some of these methods, there are SEO companies who can provide this service to help your company reach high rankings in search engines in a cost effective and professional manner following Webmaster tool guidelines.